Rebounding With Mr. Grey

Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with one new essay appearing each day for the first two weeks of February, until Valentine’s Day.

Last year, I ended my marriage and drove, without a plan, from Los Angeles to San Francisco. I rented an SUV, boxed my books, stuffed clothes into garbage bags. The remains of my defunct fashion line came last. I heaved my dressmaker’s form on top of the pile, its silhouette unintentionally and perfectly framed by the long side window: a woman who’d lost her head.

Lacking the mojo for an Eat Pray Love–style rumspringa, I retreated to the care of others. There was a week spent bedridden in a friend’s mother’s Sausalito villa; another engrossed in self-help books at my mother’s Florida beach house; and a stoned stint in an Airbnb-ed tree house on Mt. Tamalpais, where my hosts fanned me with Palo Santo smoke and administered bowlfuls of spiced lentil stew.

I was meditating, sort of, beneath a redwood tree in my brother’s backyard when I at last came to. Three months earlier, I’d quit a job I loved in New York in an attempt to salvage a fading long-distance partnership in L.A.; now I was alone for the first time in eight years, freelance, in the third act of my fertility. Both cities I’d known seemed menacing, twin hellscapes of memory. What had I done? What would I do? And where would I go?

Maybe I’d stay here. Here wasn’t haunted. Here was a city of fog and counterculture, Victorians and Vertigo—a place whose brooding air matched my own. Here, I could disrupt, in local parlance, the plot: I’d start over, far away from fashion, maybe work for an environmental organization, as I’d once dreamed about. Here, I’d find lasting love with a geek.

In order to do this, I would, naturally, go online. The odds were in my favor.

My first match was a divorced Kyle MacLachlan look-alike with a dimpled smile, a STEM doctorate, and a flair for pastry cookery. That one of his profile photos showed him swaggering in front of the NASDAQ sign failed to arouse skepticism, as did his preternaturally plump cheeks and subsequent admission that he’d shaved five years off his age. What did it matter? He was cute. He was Jewish. He was giving a keynote speech at his college reunion in Boston, and I knew what “college in Boston” meant. And during the week or so we spent exchanging emails, his thoughts and references and syntax seemed to have been transcribed from my own mind.

I decided I loved him before I knew his last name.

Once I did, I told him I’d wait to Google him. It seemed more romantic that way. But he’d gone ahead and undertaken a forensic investigation into my résumé and social network. I’d been cleared.

His Wikipedia entry popped up first. He’d founded multiple successful startups and was now a climate-change innovator, saving the world through science. Even his middle name seemed keyed to my narrative, shared as it was with a personal design icon.

I jerked awake in the middle of the night, feverish. It was him. He was it.

What was a man like this doing online?

“Maybe,” my brother offered, “he’s a bot that someone created to fuck with you.”

A first date was arranged: dinner at Chez Panisse. I ordered a beige burlap Isabel Marant minidress and Maison Margiela platform boots for the occasion. He wore jeans with baroque embroidery on the back pockets. But he had a tender, fixed gaze and good taste in wine, and went on to relay his upcoming plans to visit an internationally renowned interior decorator at their European castle, where they’d discuss designs for a new compound in the wine country. Did I know what wabi-sabi meant, he wanted to know? Of course I did. I was wearing a beige burlap minidress.

He wanted to know what had happened to my marriage. He wanted to know about my late, beloved father. He wanted to kiss me, and so we did, wildly, against a telephone pole—or was it a tree? He cited the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. They each touch a different part of the animal—the legs, the trunk, the tusk—and none can agree on what it is. It’s a science trope, he explained, a metaphor for the limitations of human subjectivity.

At one point, he withdrew to stare at me. “What color were your father’s eyes?”

We made plans to meet a week later. He texted that afternoon. “Can I ask you a weird random favor?” he wrote. “I really don’t like the smell of patchouli. Could you not wear it?” But I didn’t wear patchouli. Eventually, I identified the culprit: Aesop deodorant, the only natural remedy for underarm odor I know to be effective, worn by the most chic women in my life.

I went to Walgreens and bought Secret.

We dined at Zuni, his affections so ardent that a neighboring table sent over a round of cocktails as a gesture of admonition. After last call, he invited me to his apartment for a nightcap. There were African antiques and familiar-looking abstract paintings and stacks of Peter Lindbergh monographs; an infrared sauna—a quilted Mylar box for bodily purification—lurked in a shower stall.

I’d downloaded Why Men Love Bitches; I knew what to do. “I’m not going to sleep with you tonight,” I announced.

He cued Mogwai on the Sonos, and lit a candle. “On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you like this smell?”

I sniffed it. “6.”

“It’s from the Chateau Marmont.”

“Oh.”

This isolated display of indifference was surprisingly effective. “You look so young,” he said. “Do you use Botox?”

I said no. He said yes. I cared little.

And another question: He couldn’t tell from my profile—how averse was I to BDSM?

The next morning, bite marks smarting on my neck and shoulders but virtue otherwise intact, I flew to Chile for a 10-day girl trip. I needed the dislocation, but I passed the days longing for him and the life we’d build together, thwarting environmental catastrophe, lolling in castles. At one point, in the name of research, I streamed Fifty Shades of Grey. At another, he emailed a link: One of the companies he’d cofounded had just sold for $2 billion.

We FaceTimed, a few times. I was in Santiago, he was in London; I was in Miami, he was in Tel Aviv.

At last, we scheduled a third date. I was trying on outfits that evening when a text arrived. He’d had an MRI that day, and his doctors agreed it looked like lymphoma. He’d have to spend the evening reckoning with death instead.

I wanted to do something. I had to do something. Could I save him, just as I imagined he’d save me? Would tragedy fast-track our love? I assembled a playlist of the prettiest songs I could think of, starting with Brian Eno’s “On Some Faraway Beach.” I listened and wept, on repeat.

Given the chanceI'll die like a babyOn some faraway beachWhen the season’s over

I sent it and said I’d be there for him, no matter what.

The next afternoon, feeble with grief, I received a group email: It was a false alarm, an infection. I texted immediately; nothing happened. Several days passed. My heart sank; I forgot to eat. Finally, he called early one morning from his commute. I pressed him. He was busy. He hadn’t listened to the playlist. But he was alive; I had to see him! He’d squeeze me in on Thursday, he said. Then he had to go.

In what I was certain was a good omen, I’d been scheduled to interview the erotic-jewelry designer and sex educator Betony Vernon that day for a story. I told her everything. She told me a few things. I downloaded her book about alternative sexual practices, The Boudoir Bible. I understood now. I was ready. He texted me to “wear something slutty.” I obliged with a semi-sheer Pas de Calais slip dress.

He wanted to meet at Zuni again. He was standing at the bar, scarfing meatballs. He seemed distracted. My dress wasn’t what he’d had in mind; his preference, his fetish, was for skinny jeans. He talked about how his new company would extend the human life span to 300 years. “Would you want to live to be 300?” I asked. He said yes. I said no.

“Are you a vampire?”

As soon as I finished my Negroni, he had to go. The Fourth of July weekend was kicking off, but he had work to do, the important work of enabling people to live forever. He didn’t have time for this right now. Was I being dumped? It wasn’t clear, or I wasn’t clear. He put me in an Uber and disappeared without a kiss. I cried, then turned once more to Google:

Signs you are dating a sociopath.

I eventually left San Francisco. I made friends—offline—and ate well and even formed a garage band with a group of environmental scientists, but the city, for me, for those months, was a beautiful stranger who spoke a different language. I couldn’t have not tried, though. New phases of life—like elephants, like love—can only be what we feel of them as we fumble around in the dark.

I did, a bit later that strange summer, hear from him again. He FaceTimed me from the guest quarters of the decorator’s castle; he’d once considered taking me along, and he thought I might like to see it. But, he was disappointed to report, the whole thing was a bit too wabi-sabi for his liking. Maybe, he said, he’d just commission a barn instead.

Then he let out an anguished yelp: The rustic wood floor, as seen in so many magazines, had shot a massive splinter into his foot. He had to go.